Navigate:

GOP '16: Governors vs. D.C. insiders

Many Republicans are turning their attention to talent from outside the Beltway. | AP Photos

And it’s not only the go-getter governors themselves who view state-level leadership as the platform on which Republicans should rebuild. In their various state capitals, Republican governors have embraced common themes that could form the basis of a national message: reforming education, subduing powerful labor unions and attacking persistent recession-era deficits.

Fred Malek, the finance chairman of the Republican Governors Association, argued that state executives are at the vanguard of remaking the GOP, even if the national media spends more time on federal officials. For 2016, he said the party’s talent pool will be “led by the governors.”

Text Size

-

+

reset

“Who was the first person who came out and gave a broadside to some of the Republican principles of the past, and pointing the way to the future? It was Bobby Jindal,” Malek said, pointing out that Jindal and Walker have a platform to speak out as leaders of the RGA. “Chris Christie also has a pretty good podium, just because of who he is and what he does in New Jersey. It’s harder for some of the others to break through.”

The challenge for some will be winning the kind of national attention that’s needed to build a presidential campaign, or even to influence conversations about the future of the Republican Party. Others, like Walker and Kasich, are better known from bruising state battles that would make a mixed résumé for a national campaign.

There’s precedent for putting governors on the front lines of a party-building effort. The GOP did so in the 1990s, after electing a generation of powerhouse governors — including George W. Bush — at the start of the decade and then losing the presidency for the second time in a row in 1996. Democrats, too, turned to the governor of Arkansas to remake their party in 1992 after a string of losses on the federal level.

Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor who chaired the Republican National Committee in the mid-’90s, said it helped the party to highlight Bush and other state leaders as “the most influential, powerful and popular Republicans in the country.”

“I’m an advocate for governors having a much more public national role, emphasizing what governors are doing compared to what Obama’s doing,” said Barbour. “There’s a reason that most of the great presidents were governors. It’s the job most like president of any job, though president is a whole lot bigger job than governor.”

The immediate task for Republican governors is defending their dominance in the states in the 2014 election. The party holds 30 governorships after the 2012 cycle, including nearly every important swing state. Much of that is on the line in 2014, as states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan pass judgment on four years of Republican leadership.

The GOP’s relative strength in the states could look different at the end of the midterm cycle, if it turns out voters aren’t as enthusiastic about conservative fiscal and economic policies as they were at the height of the 2010 Republican wave. Republicans will also have to defend controversial legislation on social issues — such as bills that have passed in a number of states mandating ultrasounds for women seeking abortions — that Democrats view as a profound vulnerability.